Poetry – Page 3 – Green Chair Press Blog

Prompt Callenge: jump

The March word for my prompt challenge book group was jump, a word with no less than 24 definitions, according to the OED. Chess was a theme used by half the people in my group. Laura had cut-offs from a book she’d made with chess imagery, and used them to make a book with nearly 200 pages. Each page was numbered and many had instructions of the variety “jump to page N” which created a sort of random walk through the book. Julia made a pop-out book, where parts of the images jumped off the pages as they were turned. And Suzanne rediscovered and finished a book she’d started several years ago with verbs about escaping—jump, fall, spring…
I had a hard time getting going this month. I wanted to try handwriting whatever text I chose, but couldn’t come up with a theme. It’s spring, my garden is beginning to show life, and the bunnies will soon be back to feast on the new tiny shoots in my backyard. So I finally settled on rabbits and immediately found this promising stanza in the poem Darwin’s Bestiary by Philip Appleman.

3. THE RABBIT

a. Except in distress, the rabbit is silent,
but social as teacups: no hare is an island.
(Moral:
silence is golden—or anyway harmless;
rabbits may run, but never for Congress.)

b. When a rabbit gets miffed, he bounds in an orbit,
kicking and scratching like—well, like a rabbit.
(Moral:
to thine own self be true—or as true as you can;
a wolf in sheep’s clothing fleeces his skin.)

c. He populates prairies and mountains and moors,
but in Sweden the rabbit can’t live out of doors.
(Moral:
to know your own strength, take a tug at your shackles;
to understand purity, ponder your freckles.)

d. Survival developed these small furry tutors;
the morals of rabbits outnumber their litters.
(Conclusion:
you needn’t be brainy, benign, or bizarre
to be thought a great prophet. Endure. Just endure.)

Here are a few pages from the book I made. It was quite different to write the lines without the help of the grid I’ve been practicing with. I notice I went back to non-slant almost immediately. And despite trying to work out the line length and kerning ahead of time, I need more practice on that as well!

Prompt Challenge: Jump

The book continues with jumping rabbits…

Prompt Challenge: Jump

And now the rabbits are in Sweden, starting to multiple

Prompt Challenge: Jump

The book & poem continue, and it ends with the rabbits taking over (or enduring….)

Prompt Challenge: Jump

The Prowling Bee

This is a shout-out for Susan Kornfeld’s wonderful blog the prowling Bee. She says

The Dickinson Blog Project: I plan to read and comment on all of Emily Dickinson’s 1789 poems in chronological order.

She posts a poem once or twice a week and I’ve really enjoyed the journey. She got a bit overwhelmed and paused last September for a while, and I was really glad to see her start up again.

Collaborations

The speaker at this month’s Santa Fe Book Arts Group was Randall Hasson, a local painter and calligrapher. He took a semester course in Book Arts, where the goal was to create a book in InDesign and publish it on Blurb. He decided his book would be a collaboration with a poet friend, Chris Baron. While Hasson had been working on his ideas for combining painting and calligraphy in bound journals, he apparently hadn’t done anything with sequential, related pages. In his lecture, Hasson talked about the 2 poems he’s done thus far, taking us through his design decisions, materials, techniques and research into the imagery he would use. You can see the first poem on Blurb here.
I found the second poem (a piece of a spread is shown below and there’s another spread here), much more compelling. In both pieces, it was interesting to see how his background in calligraphy informed the page layout.

Snow Poems

Last winter I noticed block letter poems in windows around town. They appeared to be stenciled onto the glass, and the poems had a haiku-like quality. This is the one I saw regularly, at an elementary school near my house.

poem by Joey Gurulé (3rd grade), Carlos Gilbert Elementary School

This past week, at the monthly Santa Fe Book Arts Group meeting, the organizer of these “snow poems,” Edie Tsong talked about the project — “a community poetry project that explored cities as ‘living books’ written by their inhabitants.” They asked people to submit poems and also held poetry workshops around town. They used 10″ high letters for the poems, affixing them to the windows (backwards), covering the window with snow spray, then removing the letters. I only saw the poems from the outside, but apparently the way the sun cast shadows inside the buildings was quite wonderful. Here are some more pictures, the first one showing the installation (removing the letters after spraying the snow). See more about the project here.

Installing a snow poem

poem by Michelle Holland

The Poem Store

My sister sent me a lovely article from the LA Times about a woman who writes poetry at the Hollywood Farmer’s Market. It reads in part (the rest is here).

Jacqueline Suskin sits like an old-fashioned secretary between a lemonade stand and two guys selling hummus at the Hollywood Farmers Market. A sea-green typewriter rests on the tiny wooden table in front of her. Scotch-taped to the table is a letter-pressed sign that reads:

Poem Store.
Your Subject Your Price.
…
Over the course of this morning, Suskin will write about “Seizures as Spiritual Portals” for a 50-year-old fashion designer. She’ll write a poem on “Wedding Planners” for a soon-to-be bride and a poem on “Back Pain” for the fiance. And for a lithe young woman in short jean shorts and an embroidered top, she’ll compose verse on “New Beginnings,” just a few weeks after she wrote her a poem on “New Love.”

Planting Poetry

Planting Poetry is a set of colorful typographic sculptures for the garden. The poems are mesostics, a “poem or other typography such that a vertical phrase intersects lines of horizontal text. It is similar to an acrostic, but with the vertical phrase intersecting the middle of the line, as opposed to beginning each new line.” These structures are a collaboration between Burgess Studios and Misinstry of Stories, a charity in the UK that promotes creative writing for young people.
Burgess Studio has a nice slide show of some of the signs as well as photos of how they made them.

{ first seen on designworklife}